Nearly a Decade, a Few Books and a War Later, Ben Hammersley Still Most Known for Single Word: Podcast

Michael Wolf
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Ben Hammersley: The creator of the word 'podcast'

Ben Hammersley is a very accomplished person. From the five books he's authored, to his time as a war correspondent and journalist, to a whole host of university, government and think-tank assignments, his resume runs long for a man who has yet to see four decades on this earth.

So with all this experience under his belt, what do most people know him for?

A single word: podcast.

"When I'm introduced on stage by the host of a conference, the fact that I'm the inventor of the word 'podcast' always gets the biggest 'oooh' from the crowd," says Hammersley.

Well, it is a big word. Nearly a decade after Hammersley included it in an article for his then-employer, The Guardian newspaper, roughly 40 million or so people in the US alone download podcasts a year and the technology has unleashed a new era of small mini-podcast moguls, from Adam Carolla and Kevin Smith to Leo Laporte to Dan Benjamin.

Given how far podcasting has come as a medium, Hammersley must have given his creation quite a bit of thought, right?

Wrong.

"I was late on the deadline, and the story was a a little bit short. I was desperately trying to bulk it up for the next morning's newspaper."

And so he threw in a few extra words to meet beef up his article, including the line:

"But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?"

The rest is history.

Did he know of the importance of his creation right away? According to Hammersley, he noticed people were using the word, but it wasn't until he got an email a year later that he recognized the importance of what he did.

"I got an email from the Oxford English Dictionary people saying 'your's in the earliest citation of what we can find of this word. Where did you get it from?'"

What did he tell them?

"I said, 'I made it up.'"

And so the life lesson goes: We can spend years and years toiling away, but sometimes the throwaway effort we do in just a few minutes - like adding an extra line to an article - is what we're most remembered for.

If you'd like a meta-experience of listening to a podcast with Ben Hammersley about inventing the word podcast which you found out about from this post about the word podcast, you can listen to it hear.